Re: Preserve Line Breaks

Andrew Thompson wrote: 
Roedy Green wrote:

On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:47:47 -0500, hilz <now@xxxxx> wrote, quoted or
indirectly quoted someone who said :

Which data entry components preserve line breaks entered in text?  How
do you enter them without triggering a Submit?


JTextArea ?

Actually (I believe) all the standard JTextComponents preserve new lines. It's just that the return and enter keys don't always enter a line break...

Take your favourite Java application. Copy some text including a new line from a text area. Paste into a text field. Unless there is some DocumentFilter shenanigans going on, the new line should be pasted. You can then use the arrow keys to move up and down through the slit view. Same goes for tabs. Can be useful for search and replace.

I have discovered TextArea works and presumably JTextArea. . It seems to embed enter and tab keystrokes.. How are you supposed to
navigate to the next field? with the mouse? 


'Control Tab' will take the caret out of a TextArea, to
the next focusable component.

It seems a bizarre approach to usability to me. Field traversal uses a peculiar key (tab) instead of a more natural key (return). Then when it comes to text areas the traversal key is used to enter a character code that presumably is almost never wanted.

Return would be an even better choice if it wasn't moved out miles to right. Obviously it's more important to have symbols like ~ and # in closer. And ; as a home key (other than for curly brace language programmers).


Going back to my call centre days I had an interesting usability problem. Following the existing DOS environment, I had return move to the next field. That didn't make sense for text areas, so tab needed to be used as a fallback.

To complicate matter I (briefly) had a bug where a field with a single new line would prevent the form from being submitted. Agents returning through fields would hit a text area and when return didn't work would switch to the tab key. The form wouldn't submit. They would swear blind that they always used tab, but there would be a new line in the first text area.

Tom Hawtin
--
Unemployed English Java programmer
http://jroller.com/page/tackline/
.

Quantcast